The Daily Grind: What’s your favorite MMO story you like to tell?

MMORPGs are story machines. I don’t just mean that they’re games in which the writers tell you a bunch of tales, although that is certainly true. But they’re also games where the crazy multiplayer environment creates emergent and personal stories.

I always like to tell the story of how, during The Burning Crusade, I had a guildie put me on follow as she went to the kitchen for a snack break. I was on my Druid at the time and absolutely in love with my ability to transform into my insta-flight mode. So I ran her character over to a cliff and jumped off, turning into a bird as I did so. Over Vent, I heard her returning right then to see her character plunge to her doom. I think our entire guild was laughing about that for a week straight.

What’s a favorite MMO story that you like to tell? What memorable moment from your time in-game can you share with us today?

Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!

I had lots of cool things happened to me. Most i just keep for myself, many just forget. One happened just 30 mins ago on custom WoW server Project Ascension – Laughing Skull.

Ive been doing some stuff and saw a guldie (lets call him Carl) who made a new sick dots build challenging anyone to outdps him in a BG. He said he pays 300g (pretty big sum on this server) to anyone who does. Dot builds are really strong atm but my arcane mage is often in top 3 dmg done in BGs so I was up for a chellenge.

We joined. But there were several WSGs up and we ended up in wsg #3 which wasnt filled to full. Was like 5v5. We smashed enemy team and started graveyard camping them everyone trying to do as much dmg as possible for a prize. We were about even with Carl, then enemy team tired to get farmed and left the game, only one dude stayed and he kept rezzing. And against 1 dude my instant cast burst build is stronger then dot build since they take time to deal full dmg. So after farming poor guy several times while our other guys were capping flags, only 1 flag left. And more important – I was #1 in dmg in scoreboard.

Carl saw that the only way he could win this and save his money was to pick last flag and wait hoping that more enemies join. So he grabs it smiling happily. Not too fast buddy! I BoPed this smartass which made flag drop, quickly grabbed the flag and rushed to cap it knowing that even if last guy rezzes again and Carl smashes him he wont be able to catch me in dmg before I cap.

I decided to play an Evil shopkeeper mage who sold alchemist potions. My goal was to take over the world. After setting up my shops I hired some thugs and started harrassing the other shop keepers (blade spirits, energy vortexes, summon wall off their shops, etc) until they signed over their businesses. There was still one town operating, but they offered me a million gold to never step foot in their town ever again after about a week of terrorizing them and that would fund my campaign for world domination so I took it. Being Lawful Evil, I kept my word and never step foot or had my thugs attack their town ever again. I used the money to setup alchemist shops around the world and I pretty much ran the Alchemy market in game.

Eventually the same town of do gooders decided they were going to go on a holy war against the Dark Elf players. All 2 of them. I saw this as my chance to launch my plan to take over the world. I boldly stated that such barbarous actions were a potential disaster to my business and I had to respond by backing and joining forces with the Dark Elves. The war went disastrously for good players as me and my Thugs were pretty decent at PvP and the others were not. Predictably, players began to switch sides to the Dark Elves to join our side until it was pretty evenly matched. At that point the Dark Elves got organized, had leadership, and I feigned insult at the interactions with their leader and I turned on the Dark Elves as well. The result was this wonderfully peaceful Roleplaying Ultima Online server was now a madhouse of constant PvP action and fighting and being the best PvPer and controlling all the potions sources for PvP I pretty much ruled the world with my thugs.

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1 year ago

Reader

Zen Dadaist

Hrm. I don’t have just one, and a lot of them are a case of “you had to be there”. But, that said, there is one story that pops up now and then that we have named “What’s the Worst that can happen?”

Warning: VERY tl;dr!

So, it was a saturday night in Anarchy Online many years ago (2007 to be precise). We are a well geared and high level team out in Inferno, a very high level zone in the Shadowlands expansion area. We are popping pocket bosses (summoning hard boss mobs after much farming of items in order to do so, hoping for certain loot drops) at the highest level Incarnator area where you have to be in order to do this. Said Incarnator is not too far from a busy hub spot and there are a slew of interesting rare mob spawns with equally interesting loot nearby. This all means the area is often busy.

So there we are popping and killing and looting our bosses. We have the usual enemy faction players try to train other mobs on us to kill us, and failing miserably (more loot for us!), shittalking in vicinity chat etc etc – the usual. We eventually run out of assembled patterns to summon said bosses. Then the Martial Artist on our team mentions she has an assembled Projection Of Lord Galahad. It’s an enemy mob that would give us some good Faction upon killing it though we didn’t know what loot it might drop. The assembled crystal warned us it was high level but we were riding high from our successes.

She uttered the words “What’s the worst that can happen?” in our then Ventrilo channel. Well, we’d wipe and that’d be embarrasing but eh, shit happens – or so we figured.

So we summon it. Holy shit, that thing hit VERY HARD and had giant AoE DoTs and we pulled out all the stops but eventually it just totally overwhelmed us. Welp, so we wiped. We rezzed up, trekked back out, it was still there, had another go: another wipe. Fair dos, we think. We then go on our way and start poking at some other mobs nearby, assuming it’d do what all pocket bosses do if left alone for long enough – despawn.

It didn’t despawn. It started to wander. It came accross other players, proceeded to slaughter them and wandered a bit more. By this point word has got round the chat channels about his rogue mob in Inferno ganking players it aggs, so now there’s teams of players actively hunting it down.

By the time we log off to go to bed, it was still roaming around upper Inferno killing everyone in its path. Much, much rage in the OOC channels.

The next day, we log in. IT IS STILL ROAMING AROUND KILLING EVERYONE! At this point, feeling guilty we send in a /petition to summon a GM to kill it nd then we go track it down (and keep a very safe distance). GM shows up in fairly short order.

The GM couldn’t kill it. It killed the GM. Then it continued on its roam. By now word in the OOC channels was just to avoid it.

At this point we were wondering if we were going to get banned for somehow bringing into existance a mob that broke the game’s code… (in between bouts of uncontrolled laughter).

Eventually another GM (I assume a more senior one with more access to commands) came along and was able to force despawn it.

To this day there’s a group of us that will invoke the story now and then with a very pointed “What’s the Worst that could happen?” And I built one of those pocket bosses myself to link in chat as a tease whenever we do some pocket boss killing. Of course with power creep being what it is (and bug fixes over the years), we can kill it now and we have done. Repeatedly. Payback!

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1 year ago

Reader

David Blair

I survived Deathwing. At the beginning of the Cataclysm expansion they would have random events where Deathwing would appear in certain zones, breath fire on an area and kill the player and give them an achievement. I was on a flight path just North of the Dark Portal when he appeared. We intersected, my character went up like a roman candle, then when the flight path hit the next zone, her health began the regeneration process and she was fine by the time she landed.

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1 year ago

Reader

Sixuality

I was PUGing on villainside in City of Heroes, on Freedom. Freedom was the highest pop server in the game and PUG heaven (or hell, often both) and it was common for PUGs to run for hours with a constantly changing line up as you could fill up any empty slots in the team with a quick LFM in zone chat between missions.

This time the team leader (who had been running on normal difficulty, thus setting that as the difficulty for the group) left just before we entered a bank robbery mission – so the lead went to the next player in the line up, who was a Mastermind. Being an MM he had, of course, been running on max difficulty…

We zoned in and found ourselves facing an ARMY of cops and longbow agents – half the team went down in seconds, the other half scattered. Those of us still on the loose raced around the map, triggering new ambushes at every turn as we tried to coordinate an attack on the police station, trying to break in to help the other half of the team who were now trying to break out of the cells.

It was mayhem. It was chaos. It was doomed from the start… and it was incredible, frantic fun. Best of all this group of random PUGers just ran with it – nobody cared that we had very little chance of completing the mission before the timer ran out. We just enjoyed the action, and the insane challenge we’d unwittingly stepped into.

Way back when, our Guild hopped over to another MMO (Dark Age of Camelot) and started a lowbie group.

We heard about some great leveling places in high-level zones so we decided to go find them.

Being endlessly slaughtered has never been so fun. There is something magical about being with a dozen friends in an absolutely moronic situation.

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1 year ago

Reader

CasualSlacks

Shortly before the original PVP honor system in WoW was revamped, the combined forces of the twelve guilds of the Penny Arcade Alliance coordinated a strike against on the capital cities of Horde to kill their faction leaders. This was well before such activity was commonplace. There weren’t achievements or titles for those kinds of raids and we hadn’t known of anyone on a US server to do it.

Once we kicked it off, it took a long time before the Horde players knew what was going on. Our various raids were all assigned to fronts strategically spreading the pain and chaos. I believe Voljin was the first to fall. I was in one of the raids hitting Orgimmar and Mulgore and I remember traveling through Durotar on a wave of brutality. We slew Cow, Orc, and Troll NPCs, and any players who dared to get involved. I hadn’t rolled any Horde alts at that point so my intro to their home cities involved killing everybody in them.

It was while were converging on Undercity that the Horde players finally got their keks together and put up organized resistance. By then, Sylvanas and her guard were all that we had left to kill. To Sylvanas’ credit, she lasted longer than our poor Dark Iron server did. There was no chance of getting to Sylvanas after the servers came back up so after hours and hours of razing and routing the Horde, we called it a night. One of the best MMO experiences I’ve ever had.

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1 year ago

Reader

Castagere Shaikura

For some reason this story i love to tell and its about pvp. I really hate pvp in mmo’s because of the ganking. But once a long time ago in Aion. At lvl 30 while out exporing i ran into another lvl 30 something from the other faction. He was a mage and i was a chanter. No other players were around so we started dueling it out. He would win and i would win. We would rest and heal up and go at it again. We had a blast. We would sit next to each and heal up for battle.
It went on for about an hour. Then some high lvl ass from my faction came on us and one hit my friend. I never cursed so much in chat before. I told him to leave us alone and i would report him to his guild if he didn’t. He said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again. So my friend came back i threw emotes let him know all was good. We battled some more and gained a crowd that watched us from both factions giving us battle tips because it turned out we both were new to the pvp and kind of sucked at it.

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1 year ago

Reader

Fervor Bliss

a favorite story is: My partner getting a little jealous after I mentioned how cute the teacher in the principles office in Secret World was. We were questing at the time.

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1 year ago

Reader

Hirku

The LoMS agrees.

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1 year ago

Reader

Utakata

…of “eye candy” and relationships, and why I am so glad I remain’th single. o.O

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1 year ago

Staff

Andrew Ross

I was an officer in Darkfall for an RP guild. We had badges, like in boy scouts. I was taking a recruit out to earn their sailing badge. As we lived on an island, part of the assignment was to sail to an out of the way location. Remember, DF was full item drop on death, and mounts and vehicles were objects, not essentially reskins of your character. We were using my raft, which was the tier 1 “ship” but still required a large amount of effort to build (especially since the guild was also communist).

We land for a moment, the recruit packs up the raft, and we get jumped. It’s a close call since the recruit’s new to the game and, as a gatherer/crafter, I don’t have the l33t attack skills this 00ber mage did. I have no idea where the guy came from, so I just grab a few of his items and tell the recruit we’re heading back.

Apparently, the guy was nearby. He naked zerg rushes us. It’s actually STILL a close call, as he apparently gathered some reagents so he could continue to use non-default magic abilities. I keep him at bay, and the flustered recruit gets us out to sea with our assailant left on the beach. End of story, right?

No. Since we got jumped and retreated, we were off course for returning home. Our island isn’t totally safe, so there are certain areas we land so we can get the ship back in one piece. The recruit stops the raft, we make a plan, and resume sailing.

And that’s when I notice something under the raft. I go down below and it’s the mage, angry as heck. I get in a single attack but he swims up and jumps on board. The recruit’s totally flustered and is outright murdered. I use a knockback to put the would be pirate back in the water, move the raft a bit, and am able to rez my ward before he bleeds out. Like something out of a horror movie, the mage jumps out of the water again to board us, but knock him back in mid-air, sending him flying. “GO!” I shout.

I quickly tab out and enter an ally’s vent server, as most of our guild had been out with them this whole time. The mage once again managed to get under our boat, and is using a small, default AoE attack to chip away at our health. We can’t return fire because DF is a FFA PvP game. You can’t use an AoE attack without also damaging an ally (which is why I still feel like it was one of the best FFA PvP games out there, as group zerging wasn’t a viable tactic).

I’m trying to keep the recruit and myself high on health while coordinating in vent on where to get a few people to come out and kill this guy once we reach land, just in case something happens. I’m trying to get in a few good shots with carefully aimed AoE attacks, but I whiff more often than not. with shore in sight, though, I land a killing blow. The mage is bleeding out. I tell the recruit to stop the shift and finish the guy off, right where our allies can see it. It’s beautiful.

I don’t know if anyone else involved remembers this, as I don’t recall the recruit becoming too active, but it was super exciting for me. There are few times where I actually feel responsible for another player’s safety in an MMO, and I’m usually a tank. My officer rank feels more like a management assignment. But in that moment, I really felt the weight of my roles in game.